Apologies
by Carmabaeji - Lively Aria
Summary: Three months after the primaries, a body is found in the desert, but what does it mean? And where are our heroes now? SPOILERS AHOY! Alternate 11-12pm, unless I'm psychic!
1. Skeletons by the wayside

Apologies  
  
by Aria  
  
Disclaimer: They're not mine, but I wish they were, cos then I'd have a different ending to the series.  
  
Rating: PG-13  
  
Summary: Three months after twenty-four, a body is found. Includes an alternate 11-12pm, unless I'm psychic!  
  
To 'flamingteen' whose story I flamed on her review page. I apologise profusely (again)  
  
Author's note: Seeing as I haven't seen all of 24, I'm making the day up from what I've 'heard' happens along the way. Whilst I _so_ doubt that this is what happens, I needed to write it so that can deludedly pretend that Nina isn't the mole and I can still watch her scenes and be a little interested in what she does rather than what I know she will do. I have to get this story out before the series finale (please, Fox, even she is the mole, have her not die and then she can come back to haunt them in the next series) so I apologise if it's a little half-baked, also I don't want anyone to tell me if I get the events of the day muddled up, cos I'd like to still have some surprises. This one will be nowhere near the length of 'Nobel Business' and will probably end up not being a shipper fic.  
  
-24-  
  
It was his office phone that rang. "Bauer." He answered, pressing the phone into the crook of his neck as he shoveled papers into his workbag.  
  
"Jack? Hi, it's Harold." Harold Tillman was one of Jack's friends over at the police department, working a precinct quite close to his home. The last time Jack had contacted him was to ask him to keep a look out for Kim, his daughter, when she'd snuck out of the house and subsequently been kidnapped a few months back.  
  
"Uh," Jack was distracted; he was getting late to meet Kim. "Yeah, Harold, what's up?" Harold Tillman preferred to be called by his full name, he led a room full of cops, and preferred to keep his name to impress his age upon people even though he was probably younger than most he came across.  
  
"Jack, we found a body out here, buried at the side of the road, we've done a dental search..." Harold paused here, "can you come down here?"  
  
Jack struggled with the last folder, and turned his case in his hands, checking that the seams hadn't ripped any where on their way round. "What's up?" He asked, really not having enough time to follow a half thought out lead.  
  
"Jack, it's your wife."  
  
Jack was surprised. "Teri's dead." He said quietly.  
  
"Yeah, the coroner says she's been out here for nearly three months, you haven't spoken to her? I know you guys split up, but I still have to bring you in for..."  
  
Jack cut him off, Harold didn't understand. "No, she's dead. Three months ago, it was related to my work, a terrorist killed her. I've buried her body, Harold, we gave her a proper funeral."  
  
"Well, the dental records confirm it's Teri Lynette Bauer." Harold said, his voice no longer quiet and reserved; now he didn't think he was telling a good acquaintance that his wife was dead.  
  
"What are you saying? Somebody dug up my wife's body?" Jack was angry at this, although he wasn't sure why. Jack had always considered a dead body to have no resemblance of the life it once held, this was why he had no problem with the work he did. As far as he was concerned, the body was to be respected until dead as the person, and then it didn't matter. He could only think of a few reasons why people dung up dead bodies. For organs, which would have been possible if the body had been lying on the road for three months, but Teri was an organ donor, and after Nina had shot her, they'd removed all but one lung and her heart, both of which were ripped apart when the bullet tore through her body. They would have dumped the body as soon as they realised it was useless. For DNA, but this was something they worried about more when a top-level agent was murdered, to be used as access for their systems, necrophilia was the last one, and it made him physically sick.  
  
"You'd have been notified by the mortuary if that had happened." Harold stated.  
  
"Is it possible they only did it last night? That they only just dug her up?" Jack was grabbing at straws.  
  
"The coroner said something about bleaching, I don't know, anyway, he says she's been lying here in the sun. Probably died out here." Jack was getting increasingly more confused.  
  
He had a vague idea of what to do. "Okay, um can you do me a favour? Have them do as much of an autopsy as possible on the remains? Find out what's going on? And call 'Greenacres' cemetery. Exhume my wife's body?"  
  
Harold considered this for a moment as Jack made his way across his office and collected his coat and car keys from his locker. "I'll see what I can do." He said.  
  
"Thanks, do you have my cell number?" Jack asked, he wanted to be updated on this; he had absolutely no idea what he was going to find out, what was going on.  
  
"Yeah, I've got it back at the office. I'll keep you posted." Jack thanked him again, and Harold Tillman hung up the phone. Jack placed it back in it's cradle and corrected the collar of his jacket, his gaze passed over the photo on his desk. The photo was about a year and a half old now, taken before Teri died, before their separation, back when he thought she was happy with him, Christmas 1999, a few months after Operation Nightfall, and a few weeks after Kim's birthday, after their wedding anniversary. If she were still alive they'd have been six months short of twenty years together.  
  
-24-  
  
Kim was sitting in the living room when he arrived, eating a packet of potato chips, and watching a preschool cartoon. Her rolling suitcase was next to the sofa, and her carry on bag was stuffed to the brim with magazines, books and cd's. "Sorry, I'm late." Jack said as he leaned over the back of the sofa to kiss her forehead. "Did you eat?" he asked her, making his way over to the kitchen. He opened the fridge and pulled out a tub of chocolate pudding, licking the lid before he grabbed a spoon off the dryer.  
  
"I'll get something at the airport, I didn't feel like cooking." Jack sighed, not relishing in his daughter's dietary choices. He wasn't exactly one to talk, shoveling a pile of chocolate goo into his mouth. She turned down the television and turned so she could see him over the top of the sofa.  
  
He eventually finished up the pudding, dropping both the spoon and container into the bin before he realised what he'd done, he wasn't bothered enough to sort it out right now, and so settled onto the chair next to his daughter, hugging her to him. "When do we have to leave?" He asked as the television show prompted the audience to tell them to walk through a banana field.  
  
"Check in starts at two." She said, glancing up at the wall clock. It was twelve forty and just over an hour to the airport. He kissed her hair, smoothing a few strands behind her ear.  
  
He debated telling her about his unusual phone call, but knew he couldn't until there was some meaning behind it. He settled for squeezing her tighter. "I'm going to miss you." He confessed.  
  
"I'll be back in a month." She told him, "July 2nd, I'll be back so we can do something for 4th July weekend. So book it off from work." Jack nodded into her hair, and settled his gaze on the television. Kim took another handful of chips and swallowed them quickly, spilling crumbs down her top; she brushed them off quickly, and settled back into her Dad's hug.  
  
"Don't bananas grow on trees?" Jack wondered, reaching over for the remote.  
  
"Yeah." Muttered Kim, and then she turned the tv off for herself, she jumped off the sofa and clambered over her suitcase. "I'm just gonna go check my makeup and then we can go." Jack nodded, watching as she walked round the sofa and then out of his view, he stood in time to see her disappear into the bathroom.  
  
-24-  
  
Jack walked back to his car, he was depressed, and for the next month he was going to be living alone in the house he'd raised his daughter in with his wife. He'd become a rather dour person the last few months, constantly depressed. He couldn't help it, every time he looked over at a doorway, or up from the sofa, he'd see little Kim, and younger Teri.  
  
A few days ago he'd woken up and heard laughter in the other room, he was so sure he'd gotten up from bed and seen Kim finger painting at the counter, giggling, and Teri making coffee, trying to keep the paint away from the food and china. In his eyes he could see them, Teri was about to come over and ask how his leg was, and he was going to shrug her off. But Kim had called him, she was getting a lift to school with a friend, and he should get out of bed. He'd had to keep the tears from his voice as he called out 'good-bye'.  
  
He hadn't wanted to confess to Kim about his feelings a lot recently, she was hanging on by as loose a thread as he was, and it wouldn't have been at all helpful. He wanted to let her go to San Diego, see her aunt and cousins. She should enjoy herself.  
  
His cell phone rang and he took a moment to recognise it. He pulled the phone out and answered it, only to have a plane fly low over his head as the voice spoke. "We've got a match." He recognised the voice, as Tony's when he returned the phone to his ear.  
  
"A match with what?" he asked.  
  
"The body that the LAPD sent in? They said you needed this done, and they were backed up." Jack suddenly remembered what Tony was referring to. The body on the roadside.  
  
"A dental match, it's a Yelena Drazen, we pulled her records from Interpol."  
  
"No," Jack was confused, he could feel a headache coming on. "We already had a dental match for that body, look, are you sure its the same one? Where did you get this from?"  
  
"Some mortuary. They said you ordered it exhumed." Tony had even less idea what was going on than Jack did. Between the two of them there was very little logic to the conversation.  
  
Jack finally got away from the jet engine sounds, shutting the car door. "Wait, so you got a dental match on the dead body, from the mortuary to be Yelena Drazen?"  
  
-24-  
  
His mind was reeling. He'd buried Yelena Drazen as his wife and Teri had been found dead just off the road not far from his house. He had to get back in to the office if he wanted to sort this out. He may have posted out, but he needed to find out what Tony knew.  
  
Tony was surprised to see him. Jack didn't bother with pleasantries, he walked past his agent on the floor, and called his name, as requested by the tone of his voice, Tony followed him up the steps. He ignored Tony for the first few seconds as he logged onto the CTU network and told his computer to scan for anything written on or about March 9th.  
  
"Where did you get the name Yelena Drazen?" he asked.  
  
"Well, after super Tuesday, Interpol put everything related to the Drazens on the enforceweb." Tony said, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.  
  
"When we tried Nina, we charged her under the name Yelena Drazen." Jack reminded him.  
  
Tony hadn't been at the Court Marshall and judiciary committee meetings that week. He had no reason to know that. "Could they have switched the records?" Tony suggested.  
  
Jack hadn't even considered that. He ran a hand over his face and then rested his chin on it. "I hadn't even considered that." He admitted. "They found a body whose dental records matched Teri's out on a road near Bell Air. Mulholland drive, where she was abducted from."  
  
"But we saw her after that." Tony remembered, "Didn't she also have a car crash along that same strip? She got amnesia after that."  
  
Jack took a deep breath, exhaling loudly. "When Teri was sent off to the mortuary, I presume no one did any identification exams on her."  
  
"She'd been with us for hours, and when Nina shot her, you pretty much gave us a positive id." Tony told Jack. Jack nodded, agreeing with him, it had been Teri that was shot. "What if they switched the bodies after Yelena shot her?" Tony suggested, correcting himself.  
  
Tony could remember that day in his mind, he could see Nina yelling at him and Jack, telling them they didn't understand, and that they had to keep back. They'd just run out to the parking garage having deciphered a code message on Nina's note pad, it said when Kim was being moved, and had a number which to call. Outside in the garage, Nina was holding Teri at gunpoint, and Jack and he were at a face-off, both their guns drawn but unable to shoot as Teri covered Nina's body.  
  
She was a good shot, and they knew if her finger slipped, Teri would either live her life as a vegetable or die. Teri was sobbing to Jack, asking him to stop her. Nina started saying something to Teri, pressing the butt of her gun into her neck, and then Teri had ducked, trying to faze Nina, who recovered just enough to fire her gun at the base of her neck, Teri slumped to the floor, instantly dead.  
  
Jack fired quickly without hesitation, hitting Nina's shoulder low, collapsing her lung, avoiding her heart by a very narrow margin. Jack had run to Teri, desperately doing CPR, having hit 911 on his cell before he reached Teri. He was sobbing and couldn't stop the simple rhythm, crying her name as he did so.  
  
It still hadn't been absorbed by Tony that she'd been a traitor. His first instinct was to run to her, to support her head as she gasped for breath. The gun was still in her hand, her finger over the trigger, and she had enough motion to pull it, but she didn't. She didn't even try to shoot him, or Jack who was positioned right in front of the barrel. Tony had stripped off his jacket, pressing it over the sucking wound in her chest. He'd cracked a rib with the pressure, but he didn't care. At that point she was still his girlfriend as she was dying.  
  
Teri had been dead from the second the bullet had hit her, but Nina was still alive when the paramedics arrived, and so they took her to hospital, and she was treated, finishing recovery in the hospital wing of Virginia's military maximum-security prison convicted of treason, espionage and multiple murders. Four consecutive life sentences, and she hadn't even been conscious for her trial.  
  
"Unless they switched the records before Interpol released them, we've got a dead Yelena Drazen, so who does that make Nina?" Jack wondered, once they'd both relived the moment they discovered Nina as a traitor.  
  
Tony was bitter, and spat out his words. "Just someone who needed the money." He muttered, and threw a pile of dental x-rays on the desk in front of Jack. "Or maybe that was a handy extra, maybe if she thought that she got rid of Teri then the two of you could be together."  
  
Jack hadn't even considered that possibility. He hadn't thought Nina had even still harbored feelings for him after they split. From her attitude afterwards, he'd presumed she had considered it an interesting interlude in her life, nothing more. She even ridiculed him when he suggested otherwise. He could hear her voice in his head. "What do you want to know Jack, am I over you? And why are we talking about this now?" There were thousands of moments when he'd just thought, if I had killed you then, Teri and Kim would be safe now, having never had their lives threatened. He found it difficult to think of her with anything other than hate, whenever he thought of their affair, he wondered how much calculating she'd put in to it, whether she'd deliberately been upset that night at the conference, whether she'd thought she'd blown it when she'd told him off for kissing her the first time and he'd apologised, whether she'd ever actually enjoyed herself in bed with him, if any of it had been true.  
  
"Where are they holding her?" He asked Tony.  
  
"Maximum security detention centre, Virginia, they're still calling her Nina."  
  
"She woke up?" Jack asked.  
  
Nina had spent a month in a coma from complications from the gunshot wound, pneumonia, bronchitis an assortment of chest infections that they hadn't caught until they became blood poisoning and she stopped waking up in the mornings. "Last I heard, I stopped paying attention about two months ago."  
  
Tony would never admit it, not to anyone anymore, but he'd been in love with her. Maybe, to some extent, that made her betrayal of him even more painful than her betrayal of Jack. 


	2. Awoken from a nightmare

Jack had never had to psyche himself up for an interrogation before.  
  
He'd come to the prison last night to speak to a few of her nurses, the wardens, and the guards. He had permission to interrogate her, and they were going to start today, early. Earlier than the morning bells, give her less than ten minutes to dress and put her in front of him. She wasn't going to have any idea what was going on, and that's exactly how he wanted it.  
  
"Just remember how perfect she was when she lied to us, Jack." Tony had warned him, "Inventive, scheming, she always had all the details. Don't believe her unless she's hooked to a polygraph machine." They'd set up a polygraph machine in the interrogation room, and he'd had to pull some strings, but there wasn't going to be anything on the other side of the glass except a camera.  
  
He touched the door handle to enter the interrogation room and for a second he could feel Teri there beside him, wanting him to know how or why she died. She gave him the courage to go in.  
  
Nina was dressed in white, standard issue prison uniform. They were a few sizes too big, and hung down low at her waist and the v reached to the top of her tank top. The sleeves would have covered her hands, if it weren't for the handcuffs. "Is she violent?" he asked the guard and the nurse as they moved to leave the room.  
  
"Not generally." Replied the nurse.  
  
"Then take them off." Jack ordered. Her eyes were downcast, watching the table, avoiding his. Her hair had grown although not by much, it was long enough to fall in front of her eyes, covering them from his view. She was much paler than she had been before, now it had almost an iridescent white tinge, it sucked the colour out of the room, like the fluorescent lights did. The nurse was protesting, and Jack ignored her, just ordering her to take the cuffs off again. The guard moved in and unhooked each cuff in turn, leaving them open, so she could be recuffed if need be.  
  
Nina watched them leave the room, waiting until the guard was gone. As the door shut, she began to rub her left wrist, there was a scratch down it. Jack noticed her uniform slip down and expose the wound where he'd shot her, now a long jagged line down the side of her chest, where they'd opened her up, and a second down the centre of her chest where they'd cracked her ribs. He poured her a glass of water.  
  
"Which would you prefer? Nina or Yelena?" he asked, taking off his jacket and putting it over the back of his chair. She didn't answer. She pushed her hair out of her eyes and Jack could see moisture gathered there, she was trying not cry. "You're upset, tell me, do you feel any remorse about killing my wife?"  
  
She ran a hand across her face, the long sleeve absorbing any moisture. "You met her, Nina. You _knew_ me, how could you do it?" She shook her head, and scooped her legs up onto the chair, wrapping her arms around them.  
  
She was a shell of whatever he'd known before. The nurses said she'd been psychotic, randomly violent when she woke up, she'd claimed it wasn't Teri, in the end, she'd been started on tranquilizers and antidepressants. Even if you hadn't known her before, you could tell she was medicated. It frustrated him. "Nina, look at me!"  
  
She raised her head to slowly, he almost told her again. When she finally looked at him, she was unfocused, and blinking seemed to take forever.  
  
"What happened that night at CTU?" he asked, finally sitting down. He was worried he'd get so exhausted trying to get her to talk, that she'd never say anything and he'd faint. Nina's eyes didn't follow him and he had to call her name again.  
  
"I don't remember." It was a whisper, so quiet he barely heard it, and then the tears started flowing. She didn't make a sound as she wiped them off.  
  
"You shot someone, Nina, I shot you - it was a pretty eventful night. You're telling me you don't remember?" Jack had violently hated this woman for the last three months, it had been easier that he hadn't seen her, but right now, he just wanted to stop her crying. It wasn't like all his earlier emotions were flooding back, it was just the emptiness. He couldn't hate this woman, he didn't even know who she was.  
  
"She had a phone, there was....I don't know....a gun? A...something she said? I didn't know for sure. I don't..." She pressed a hand to her forehead and rocked it from side to side. Then suddenly, she looked up. "It wasn't Teri." She sounded sure of herself, holding his gaze, she'd stopped crying, the tears evaporating off her pale skin. For a moment Jack was mesmerised, was this his Nina? The one he thought he trusted, her sudden appearance surprised him.  
  
The just as soon as she'd appeared, she went again, sucked back into the hollow of drugs. She put her head back down on her hands and sobbed, just the once. The rest of the tears were silent, dropping down faster and faster until he couldn't watch any more. "Stay with me, Nina." He couldn't tell if the exaggeration of each swing was supposed to be indicative of a 'no'.  
  
He got out of his seat and walked around the table, he finally squatted down on the floor next to her, pulling her arms off the table so she had to look at him. "Nina." He said quietly.  
  
She shook her head and moved to rest her arms on the table again, he held her wrists with one hand and with the other he pulled her legs round to look at him. "Look at me?" he requested, pleading with her.  
  
She responded more to the tone in his voice than anything. Letting her gaze move from her knees to his face. "Was I really wrong? Jack, did I shoot Teri?"  
  
Jack didn't know how to respond to her, she seemed so confused. She was still crying, the tears disappearing down her cheeks and darkening the uniform, pouring down her cheeks and chest. Jack studied the floor tiles as he thought about how to answer her. He wasn't even sure if he'd buried the right woman, he hadn't even seen her when he'd gotten back to CTU that night. It was conceivable she wasn't his wife, but he'd spoken to her only a few hours earlier. It was terrifying to think she was right. But they had tape of Nina speaking in Serbian on her telephone, calling herself Yelena, and as Tony had pointed out, she had always been a convincing liar.  
  
"Jack..." He glanced up at her, his gaze resting on her collarbone for a minute. It was thinner than a pencil, protruding from her chest so obviously. He considered the angle she was sitting at, and then glanced down at her wrists, they were tiny in his hand, not a scrap of flesh around them, easy to hold in his one hand. He traced the scar on her wrist with his thumb, and was only awoken when she sniffed.  
  
He couldn't interrogate her like this. Her body, the effects of the medication, it made him want to vomit. She didn't remember anything, she was lucid, fading in and out of being coherent and dissolving into mountains of tears. He stood up. "I can't interview you like this." He softened his wording, he walked around to his case and opened it up, tossing her a Kleenex from a little packet he only kept to wipe his hands off after checking the oil in his car. She took it and wiped her cheeks, saturating it in seconds.  
  
He shut his briefcase and told her he'd be back tomorrow and then left the room.  
  
-24-  
  
The woman found in a ditch by the side of the road was Teri, the woman he'd buried was Yelena. "It might have been their escape plan." Tony's voice was coming through the receiver loud and clear despite the fact he was at the other end of the country.  
  
"What do you mean?" Jack loosened his tie and got down on his knees to peruse the minibar. He needed a heavy drink after today.  
  
"Well, think about it." Tony was framing a picture in his mind. "Yelena kills Teri, and some other random woman, and then they swap the bodies, leave Teri's out near where she had the crash to make it look like she died there, and put the random woman in the coffin. Meanwhile back in Belgrade, her family are swapping her medical records with someone else's to make it look like she was killed, to make you think that Nina's innocent, and that Teri was a spy."  
  
It seemed viable, but in Jack's mind, it seemed like to complicated an escape route. In principle they were simple, quickly getting an operative off the hook so they could go on to do other things. "So in that theory, Yelena is Nina."  
  
"That's the name she used on the phone call she made to Drazen." Tony said, as though his simple comment supported his theory. In some ways he was right, it did, but only to a certain extent.  
  
"You've been reviewing the video footage?" Jack checked, reaching his arm behind the Dours whiskey for the Jack Daniels.  
  
"Yeah." Tony replied, "just noon onwards."  
  
"The call we nailed her for was at 11 o'clock though, wasn't it?" Jack didn't know why Tony would watch 12 hours of footage unless he had to.  
  
"A quarter to, I was trying to see what else she might have done suspicious though." Tony explained, Jack levered the bottle free, and rose back onto his feet.  
  
"Did you find anything?" Jack queried.  
  
"She did plenty suspicious, but we spent most of the day hiding you from Alberta. I'm sure of what she was doing for most of it, but truth is, anything I thought she was doing for you, could have quite easily been for them." Jack nodded. It was a problem they had to contend with, none of this made any sense.  
  
"Call Interpol and find out when they got those records for Yelena, see if there's anyway they could be false. Find out if Nina had any family fights, if she wasn't speaking to her family for a while."  
  
"How far back do you want me to look?"  
  
"Three and a half four years, start there and work your way back. It must have been before she joined CTU, maybe whilst she was at district, although I doubt it. Mason's known Nina most that time." Jack hated the fact that he had to trust him, but bottom line was that he was clean, at least as far as assassination plots went.  
  
The other line clicked and Jack realised he was done with Tony. "Anything else?" Tony asked, as though he could hear the click.  
  
"No, no, I'll give you a call at 7am your time, to find out what you've got for me." As soon as Jack clicked the receiver, the phone line switched over, and he heard a happy sounding Kim on the other end. "Hey, Sweetheart." He greeted her.  
  
"Hi dad, I got your message. What are you doing in DC anyway?" She asked. He'd left a voicemail on her aunt's answering machine giving the number where he was staying in Virginia, and asking her to call later in the day.  
  
"Some business with an old friend." Technically it was true. He pushed Nina's record to one side of the bed and grabbed a little magnetic chessboard. "You got your next move?" He asked, moving a few slightly wayward pieces back into the centre of their squares.  
  
"Knight E3 to F6." She told him. He moved her piece, wincing as he collected his bishop off the board and stuck it to the underside, along with his rook and one of his knights.  
  
"I taught you this game too well." He grumbled. "Pawn, G7 to F6." One little pawn was nothing to sacrifice for a knight. "How's your aunt?"  
  
"Worrying about you." He heard his sister-in-law's voice call down the phone. She was probably sitting across the room from Kim, her voice was quite faint.  
  
"Why is she worried about me?" He inquired of Kim, who was busy thinking about her next move.  
  
"Well, she was saying it was cos you were going to be in our house all alone, not that long after mom, all alone, with nothing to do, and you've been upset recently...." Kim trailed off, she didn't take her aunt's comment seriously, and it was obvious from her tone.  
  
"But now I'm in DC, I've got work to do." Jack said. It cheered him up to realise his wife's family still cared about him. "What's your next move?"  
  
He heard a loud bang on the telephone line and jumped. "What was that?"  
  
"I wanted to go outside, dad, there's something else..." She wanted some privacy on the phone line, "You know Sara's pregnant..." Sara was Kim's cousin, she was in her late-twenties living with a university professor she was seeing, and this was her second child. The first was three years old, Kim was the child's godmother, Sara and Kim got along that well.  
  
For a second Jack's heart stopped beating as he wondered if Kim was pregnant. The last boy she'd been interested in was Rick, the kid who had gotten her kidnapped, but as far as he knew, he was off at college and Kim rarely mentioned his name anymore. "Kim?"  
  
"When mom died, she was pregnant...I don't know if you knew...but, just looking at Sara, brought it all up, I told her and she said I should tell you. That you had a right to know." Jack felt a little short of breath, he thought about the innocent life inside Teri that had died. As though Teri wasn't already innocent, it made him feel light headed.  
  
"Dad?"  
  
"Dad?"  
  
"I'm still here, honey." He said eventually, when his stomach had returned to his body.  
  
"You okay?" She asked.  
  
"I'm fine, it's terrible, honey, the whole thing is terrible."  
  
"It would be nice, you know, to have a little baby wandering around, a brother or sister to play with?" Kim was fantasizing. For a moment he could imagine his grown daughter, sitting on the patio in the garden, wearing ridiculously low cut blouses and jeans, but looking so pretty as the sunset reflected off her golden hair and skin.  
  
"Anything but this life would be nice right now Kim, but it'll be nice again." Jack philosophised. 


	3. Conversations with walls

-24-  
  
"Hey, it's Tony. I've just gotten the ME's report from the body found off the road." Tony didn't waste time on pleasantries, and Jack appreciated that. Standing in the viewing room, watching as they brought Nina in for her second round of questioning, he didn't have much time.  
  
"What did you find?" Jack asked, checking to make sure he could see Nina's chair and the area directly around it in the viewfinder.  
  
"You were right, 11 weeks." Tony told him. "I take it Teri was pregnant then?" Jack didn't want to respond to him, it was too hard. It had taken him less than a few seconds to realise that the child wasn't his. Eleven weeks was Christmas time, it was a painful Christmas without her and Kim, but he'd already been with Nina a few months then, and evidently Teri had met someone to ease her pain too. He was didn't know whether it was a good or bad idea that she hadn't told him.  
  
"Have you gotten a hold of Nina's family?" Jack asked, moving swiftly on.  
  
"Yeah, they called, and we sent a pair of FBI agents over to their house. They saw her just before Christmas and again in the summer." Tony told him, "They stand by their testimony at the court Marshall, and we checked them out."  
  
"How?"  
  
"Her father's boss, the tutors at her mother's university." Tony explained, "Most have known them for ten, twenty years. I also got an agent over to her brother's house, he checked out too."  
  
"Good." Nina was dropped back into her chair, and he adjusted the focus on the camera.  
  
"All that proves to us is that Nina's family think she's an upstanding citizen." Tony pointed out. "If you asked whether or not they thought she'd ever sleep with a married man then..." Tony finally realised he was overstepping a line, and promptly shut up.  
  
Jack wasn't about to debate the merits of his affair with Tony; he wasn't going to point out he was separated, or that Nina had been initially resistant to the affair. She'd accused him, wrongly, of having a motive in his mind from the day he'd hired her, and complained that most of the people in the office thought she could only have gotten her job by sleeping with him. It'd taken days to get the chance to apologise to her, and when he finally had, she'd shut him up, telling him she very much doubted any of that was a problem. "If Interpol claim that their records are true..."  
  
"So, Nina's not Yelena Drazen. It doesn't mean that they didn't switch the bodies..." Tony was rude whenever he talked about Nina. He'd prefer not to do it; he didn't want to think about her.  
  
"I'm going in to interview her now." Jack ended the conversation. He didn't want Tony to irritate him and have him go into the interrogation already riled up. Just looking at Nina, knowing what she'd done, it angered him enough. "I'll call you if I get anything out of her."  
  
-24-  
  
She was a more co-operative today, more focused. Yesterday he'd come back to see her, and the doctors had told him that he needed to wait another day. They dramatically reduced her medication and she'd had some problems with withdrawal, nosebleeds, headaches, and cramps. They refused to let him interrogate her, although he did watch her sleeping in a windowed room in the infirmary.  
  
He held the door open for the prison guards to leave and then went back over to the table, briefcase in hand.  
  
"Did you shoot, Teri?" He asked.  
  
"That's what they tell me." Nina was fidgeting; she hated sitting for too long.  
  
"The other day you told me it wasn't her. That's what you told the nurses when you first woke up. It's why they put you on all that medication." Jack couldn't understand why all of a sudden she'd changed her mind about talking to him.  
  
She didn't say anything. She raised her eye line to him and challenged him to say anything more.  
  
"Let's say you did shoot Teri. Why did you do it?" He asked her.  
  
Once again she didn't respond, she grabbed the glass of water. Jack gripped her wrist, keeping her hand low, eventually wrestling the glass of water free. He didn't like people to be comfortable when they were being interrogated. Nina gave him a fierce look. She was almost back to her old self. He could believe this woman could lie to him.  
  
"Did you do it for the money?" Nina raised her eyebrows at him, folding her arms and leaning back on the chair.  
  
"Cos, I got to tell you, it doesn't look like they paid you very much." He unzipped his briefcase as he spoke, pulling out a manila folder and scattering her assets across the table. She had two or three savings accounts, several credit cards and a couple of current accounts. She was a single woman, whose social life had been limited by her job, who'd made twenty or so thousand dollars a time on the lecture circuit. Her assets outweighed his, despite the difference in salary and being seven years his junior. Despite the figures on the paper, each contribution could be traced back to a legitimate purpose.  
  
Nina leant forward and glanced at the sheets of paper. She looked at each sheet of paper before sliding it to the left. Jack doubted she was looking to check if she paid her Amex bill, he was beginning to think she might have been innocent, although he still didn't understand why she wouldn't talk to him.  
  
"We've got a recording of a telephone call you made in Serbian. You call yourself Yelena, and rung one of the Drazen brothers." Nina wasn't normally this easy to read, the effect of the drugs she was still on, and the withdrawal made her movements so obvious. Her eyes rolled from inanimate object to inanimate object as she tried to recall what he referred to.  
  
"We've also got video footage of you denying it fiercely until they medicated you." Nina looked up at him suddenly, averting her eyes when she realised how obvious she'd been. "Do you want to see it?"  
  
Nina opened her mouth, she was about to plead with him, and she didn't want to see it. She seemed scared of what she'd become, what her life had been reduced to. It pained him too. "I'll try and remember the tape tomorrow." He said, concealing the videotape under a pile of papers inside his case.  
  
Nina stood, shaking out her wrists, she had time to pace the room once before he stood to join her. She hated being interviewed, interrogated, she couldn't sit in one place for a long period unless she believed it would be productive. Walking seemed to help her think.  
  
He perched himself on the edge of the desk. He was probably booking his video feed, but he wasn't all that bothered, he'd remember whatever she said with video quality anyway. "Come on, Nina, if it wasn't for the money, why'd you do it?" She glanced over for a second, and then looked back around the room as she paced.  
  
For a minute he considered perhaps the drugs had affected her memory, that she actually couldn't remember what he was asking her about. He recalled people needed memory triggers when they forgot things, most people didn't react well to pressure, but Nina thrived under it. Everything worked faster in her mind when she had a deadline.  
  
"If they weren't paying you, come on, why? Tony thought perhaps you were jealous of Teri." Her vision snapped to him, and for a minute she gave the game away, stopping in front of him for a millisecond. "Was that it? You thought, 'I knock off Teri, maybe eventually Jack'll come back to me'?"  
  
She began to pace a different wall, uncomfortable with his proximity, so he advanced, enclosing her against the second wall until she couldn't get past him, and eventually she had to walk around him to avoid his questioning. "Were you jealous, Nina?" He grabbed her wrist and pulled, light as a feather she almost flew back to the wall, landing with an audibly painful thud against the painted cinderblocks.  
  
Then he cornered her, leaning in. She had been claustrophobic ever since a stint in solitary during an intensive course that she hadn't realised was part of her CTU training. It hadn't been a problem, but when high, it might just show.  
  
"Come on, Nina, our first night together?" He let his voice drop, knowing that if he used that tone to interrogate her it would let her feel safe, whilst disturbing her at the same time. "You wanted to relive that right? You could have spent the last three months being helpful, someone for me to lean on right, I'd realise who I could really trust, no worries about me getting back with Teri..."  
  
"No!" She yelled at him. He was taken aback, even though he didn't move. "I wouldn't, you think I could kill Teri because I thought.."  
  
"Because you thought what, Nina?" Behind him, one of the guards came through the door behind him. He ran over and grabbed one of Jack's arms pulling him back and away from Nina.  
  
She was pulled with him, he was still gripping her wrist, and when he eventually let go, she tumbled to the floor. "The nurses told you!" Exclaimed the guard, as another came over, gripping Jack's other arm and successfully getting him away from Nina.  
  
The nurse rushed in to help Nina up as she coughed on the floor. Her shirt had drifted up as she fell, exposing her belly button. Jack noticed a darker line of pigmentation in her skin down her stomach as the guards thrust him towards his briefcase. He got the hint, and packed his papers up as the nurse escorted Nina out of the room. 


	4. The visible invisible scars

"I don't think she's guilty." Jack told Tony.  
  
"Tell me again after the polygraph." Tony rudely commented, listening to his superior over the telephone.  
  
"She's not..."  
  
"Remember how she used to lie to us?" Tony pointed out, "Jack, she was so convincing, you'd know she was lying but she didn't let up. You couldn't poke a single hole in her stories."  
  
"She's not guilty, Tony, but I think she's trying to get me to believe she is." Jack was watching the footage of Nina on the video muted, watching her body language, trying to get any hints from it that he could. He'd done this thousands of times with Nina, whenever he couldn't find her to sit in on an interrogation with him, she'd come up to his office and watch the tapes, pointing out anything that caught her eye. She was a psychologist, a student of human behaviour, and a pretty good master of it. None of the things she pointed out to him as common flaws in people's lies stood out to him.  
  
She had always kept something back, she'd always hidden a few reasons, she told him there were few tell tales signs that indicated lying from person to person, but the trick was to look for something a little more individual. See what their own person mannerisms were, and then watch them whilst they lied. She said, that if in doubt, get them to say something they know is true and then check them with a lie. The problem with that was, Nina hadn't lied to him. "Why would she do that?" Tony asked.  
  
"I don't know, but it's what I need to find out. Look, go through the video tape again, decompress everything." Jack ordered him, pausing the video play back for a second to concentrate on Tony. "I want you to track Nina's movements for the entire day."  
  
"Okay."  
  
"I want you to track her movements for the entire day...fax them to me at my hotel. I want to know what she did, how long it took her." Tony agreed again, "Everything, Tony." Jack stressed.  
  
"I'll get on it." Tony said and Jack hung up the phone, pressing play on the VCR remote again. Jack watched as Nina scanned pages of her bills, IRS reports, account statements, she had a worried expression on her face. She was looking for anything that shouldn't have been there, not thirty dollars, at Barnes and Noble, but three million from a nonexistent financial company.  
  
-24-  
  
The wires were connected across her forehead and chest, each one fed into a specific input of the polygraph machine. The interpreter had spent the last hour fixing the little wires in place, put each pad over a particular nerve or blood vessel, fixing it into it's own individual port on the back of the machine. Jack walked in just as he began the calibration questions.  
  
"Is your full name, Nina Siobhan Myers?" asked the bland looking FBI agent, his pen poised over the sheet of paper. The lines on the machine moved back at forth, at what Jack was sure was an irregularly slow pace, and Nina answered.  
  
"Yes." No frantic activity, but then they hadn't expected any.  
  
"Are you 30 years old?"  
  
Nina thought for a minute. "Yes." Jack didn't know when her birthday was exactly, and hadn't realised how much younger than him she was, nine years, but he knew she'd had one whilst they'd been together. He'd bought her a pair of earrings that she'd worn quite regularly at CTU, she wasn't allowed to wear any in this prison, part of the maximum security rating. Nina was probably the least dangerous in-mate here.  
  
"Were you born at County General Hospital, Chicago?"  
  
"Yes." She rubbed her eyebrow. Today's meeting had been postponed as well, the doctor at the hospital had decided to take her completely off another medication, and once again he'd been told she'd gone through terrible withdrawal yesterday. She didn't notice as a rivulet of blood made its way from her nose and down her fulcrum.  
  
Jack reached into his pocket and passed her a tissue. She looked at it quizzically and he had to press it to her nose to stop a large drop running off and staining the shirt. She took the tissue, and once she'd seen the blood stain, wiped at her nose, leaving a smudged layer of blood under her nose.  
  
Jack was a little bothered by how worried he was about Nina, by a jury of her peers she was guilty, murder, espionage, terrorism, treason. She'd been sentenced to jail for murdering his _wife_ but having visited her in jail, having seen what she'd become, he still hated himself. Even after so long, she still had an effect on him, he wasn't sure if the doubt he felt over her guilt was what allowed him to be concerned for her, or if he doubted her guilt because of it.  
  
"Are your parents Leopold and Kathryn Myers?" The man prodded on, adjusting his bland tie.  
  
Nina glanced down at Jack, who promptly got off the floor and took his seat across the table. "Yes."  
  
"Of Chicago, Illinois?"  
  
"Yes." She looked uneasy when she glanced over at Jack, he got the impression she wanted to be hard on him during their conversation, but passing her the tissue had probably endeared him to her a little.  
  
"Is your brother Judas Myers?"  
  
"Yes." The answers were coming faster now, and the polygraph interpreter leant forward to draw his lines and write on the graph at a faster speed.  
  
"Aged 26?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Of West Dover, Vermont?"  
  
"No." The polygrapher had deliberately asked a question to which the correct answer was no, they commonly did this towards the end of the calibration to check if the candidate had any differences in their 'yes' and 'no' responses. Many people did, but weren't aware of it, on a subconscious level they reacted differently to replying 'no' rather than 'yes'.  
  
For Nina the needles remained constant. "He lives in Keene, New Hampshire."  
  
The polygrapher looked over at Jack, "Does he have any children?"  
  
"Yes, two." She replied.  
  
"I'm satisfied I have a baseline." The polygrapher told him, and Jack nodded, opening up the file in front of him. He'd printed a list of questions he wanted to ask, but just in case he got off track, he'd put the video recorder on in the other room.  
  
"Did you kill my wife, Teri Bauer?" he asked.  
  
"Yes." The polygrapher drew a line on the page, he didn't say anything, but Jack could see from the motion of the needles that she was telling the truth.  
  
"Did you do it for money?"  
  
"No."  
  
"Did you do it out of jealousy?"  
  
"No."  
  
"Why did you do it then?"  
  
"A polygraph only works if you ask me yes or no questions." Nina corrected him, evidently having regained herself enough to point out his flaws again. "Ask me a yes or no question." She demanded.  
  
"Nina..." He began.  
  
"Ask me a yes or no question, Jack."  
  
His temper escalated for a moment, and then he thought of a new line of questioning. "Did you kill my wife out of cold blood?"  
  
She gritted her teeth. "Yes."  
  
"Was it motivated by money?"  
  
"No."  
  
"Jealousy?"  
  
"No."  
  
"Did she do something to indicate she might have been working against CTU? As a threat to Palmer?" Jack watched her fidget for a moment waiting for her answer.  
  
"No."  
  
Out of the corner of his eye Jack saw the needles go mad, and he watched Nina bury her face in her hands. He could have ended the interrogation there. "Why are you lying to me?" He asked.  
  
"Polygraph machines won't tell you which words out of a sentence are true, you can't expect..."  
  
"Why are you lying to me?" He growled at her, getting up from the table and leaning over her, he could see the muscles around her eyes contracting, forming temporary wrinkles as she attempted to calm herself. He put a hand on her shoulder, wrapping his thumb around her neck and placing gentle pressure on the underside of her neck to encourage her to lift her head.  
  
When she didn't respond he got angry, he pulled his hand away, and grabbed her wrists pulling her hands out from under her head. Her head flopped down before she recovered. She groaned, and tugged a hand back to her temples. He wouldn't let her take one.  
  
She looked dizzy, her eyes opening and closing rapidly as she began to faint. She slipped off the side of her chair and fell to the floor, Jack held her hands tightly enough to break her descent, maneuvering himself around the desk so she could fall, and she was unconscious before she hit the ground. The polygrapher pressed a button in the machine, which detached the cables, and he knelt by her side, pulling them off one side of her forehead to let him feel her neck.  
  
He found a pulse, as he expected, and asked the polygrapher to call the guards.  
  
-24-  
  
"Jack, where's my bath robe?" he could hear Teri ask from the bedroom. He made little effort to help her, prodding at the eggs in the frying pan with the spatula. "Jack!" She appeared in the doorway and he turned.  
  
"You know, if you keep wandering around like that...I'm going to start hiding it." Jack warned her, taking a moment to appreciate his naked wife in the doorway before he turned off the heat and pushed the eggs to a back burner.  
  
Teri folded her arms just under her breasts and took the towel off of her hair, she rubbed the long brown tresses between two sides of the towel, shaking off as much excess moisture as she could. "I've got class in forty- five minutes, Jack." She grumbled as he wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her to him, collecting the remaining water on his trousers and shirt.  
  
"We've got time."  
  
"Jack..." she warned him, kissing him just the same. She was distracted by the smell of food and pushed him quickly away, heading to the hob and the two half completed plates of breakfast. "God, this looks delicious." She collected a rasher of bacon passing it between her two hands until she'd cooled it significantly to eat.  
  
Jack collected her forgotten towel off of the floor and draped it over the back of the kitchen chair, catching his wife from behind as she put the food back down on the plate. "You can't wander around naked like this."  
  
"I know, I know, class..." Teri was graduating next month. She was on the last few weeks of her last term of college, completing her coursework for her masters. She didn't actually have classes, merely attending to get her professors suggestions for her already outstanding pieces. "I should be getting dressed."  
  
"Or I should be getting undressed." Teri turned and kissed him for a moment before, as earlier, she rejected him for some food, this time sausage. He watched her, exasperated. "When does the horny stage of pregnancy begin?" He whined, watching as she started on the sausage off of his plate.  
  
"I'm only just done with the morning sickness phase, Jack." She told him, holding half a sausage in one hand. She broke the egg yolk in the frying pan, dipping her sausage into it, and then took another bite. "The hungry phase is only just starting, let me enjoy this bit." She dipped the sausage into the egg yolk, and finished off the last of his sausage.  
  
"Just tell me the horny phase isn't the last one." Jack complained, as once again she pushed past him, and collected the towel, hanging it over her shoulders to catch the water in her hair.  
  
"I think it is...just about the time I get so big you're repulsed by me." She joked, smiling. Once again she folded her arms across her chest and Jack approached her, wrapping his arms around her to kiss her, "That, my darling..." he said in between kisses, "...will never happen."  
  
Teri beamed, for now satisfied with his answer and he lowered a hand to the very slight bump, just above her hips. He ran a finger over her belly button. He kissed Teri once more before leaning down and kissing her stomach. "When Monkey grows up, they'll be able to blush as their parents kiss at their class plays."  
  
She thumped the back of his head. "I meant when I'm fat, Jack, but thanks for that vote of confidence!" Jack had to check it was a good-natured move, her emotions were always erratic, and pregnancy seemed to have amplified the swings. He kissed the bulge once more when he was satisfied, and scowled as he noticed a line of dark pigment down her belly. It started at her belly button, and ended in her pubic hair.  
  
"What's that?"  
  
"Monkey as you insist on calling it..."  
  
"That." He traced the line down her belly with a finger, drawing her attention to it.  
  
"Dr Gellman says it's nothing to worry about, lots of women get lines of dark skin there during their first pregnancy." Teri explained, as her husband took a closer look at the line, like a selective tan, thousands of little dots of dark skin.  
  
"What is it?" He finally settled to his knees, tired of hunching down. "Like a line where your skin is stretching?"  
  
"Don't know, either way, Jack, he says its perfectly normal. Don't worry."  
  
He nodded, and placed another kiss to her belly. "Perfectly perfect." He stood and smacked her lightly on her butt cheek. "Get dressed, you've got school, missy."  
  
"That's Mrs. to you." She waggled her finger at him and then wandered off, back to the bedroom.  
  
-24-  
  
Jack rolled over, reaching out in the darkness for the hotel lamp, he fumbled around for several minutes before he found the switch, wincing as the light hit his eyes like a sharp pain. He grabbed a notepad and pen off the table before he retreated back to the bed, covering his eyes with the sheet and turning his back to the light.  
  
When the tears from the light had been rubbed off his cheeks he unfolded himself from the duvet and took the lid off of the pen. In large letters he scribbled "Nina...Pregnant?" across the pad and threw it down on the floor by the bed. He hit the light's switch with his hand, harder than necessary, and rolled over to get back to sleep.  
  
-24- 


	5. What did it matter?

"Doctor..." Jack chased the Doctor a few feet before the man turned and realised he was being called.  
  
"Yes."  
  
"You're treating Nina Myers?" Jack had cornered him in the middle of the doorway and was holding the swinging doors open as he spoke. Unfortunately he'd chosen to stand in the path of the two and Jack couldn't move, lest the door swing back and hit him in the face. "Can you run some tests on her for me? I'm concerned she may be pregnant."  
  
The doctor frowned at him for a moment, "Miss Myers?" The man had an air about him that let Jack to believe he hadn't been working in the prison long, he wandered off, leaving Jack to collect the clipboard off the end of her bed. He flicked through the chart. "Yes, yes, she is...it's why I've been taking her off all the medication Garber put her on."  
  
"Garber..."  
  
"Her previous doctor, he put her on a range of psychoactives, didn't check the admissions documents from the hospital in LA." He wrote a few notes on her chart and checked them off with the clipboard he carried, ready to move onto the next patient.  
  
Jack rubbed a hand across his forehead. "How far along is she?" The doctor had replaced her clipboard in the hole by the time he asked, and had to retrieve it.  
  
He flicked through several pages, until he found the ob-gyn's page to the report. "She's 16 weeks, the baby is developing slowly because of the medication."  
  
Jack suddenly had all the mental images he'd had before Kim was born, of deformities, of stillbirth, it made him panicked. "Will the child have any permanent side effects?" He ventured, silently begging for a no.  
  
"There's no way for us to tell yet, there are so many possible complications." The doctor wasn't being very reassuring, but then he had no way to know how worried Jack was, he was just a visiting prosecutor. Jack nodded, slowly and took the chart off of the doctor, inserting his thumb in the page where the doctor had referenced her pregnancy. His mental tape loop kept rolling, and red flagged something the man had said earlier, just as he headed back towards the nurses station.  
  
"Doctor, you said that they found out she was pregnant when she was admitted to hospital in LA?" Jack checked.  
  
"Yes...The report from the admitting physician is in her file." The doctor offered, turning his back to walk away once again.  
  
"I'm sorry, doctor, is it normal for female patients to be tested for pregnancy?"  
  
"Unless they're minors, yes...especially after high risk accidents, Miss Myers' fainting yesterday, blackouts, nose bleeds, they're all potential signs of pregnancy. Surgeons typically prefer to avoid surgery on a pregnant woman." The doctor explained, Jack looked as though he needed time to digest the information. "Is that all?" He asked, tucking the file into his body. He didn't want to turn away whilst he still had questions, not again.  
  
"Yes, thank you doctor."  
  
-24-  
  
Jack took a bite of his sandwich and opened up his date book. The little black leather rectangle normally lived in his briefcase; his daughter only used it now, although there was a time when Teri had scribbled little messages to him inside. He rarely forgot an appointment, but she still had written them in for him. This years one was devoid of Teri's hand writing, very little of Kim's, and a few words written by Nina. Paranoid to the end, Jack had requested that she put any notes for him in his date book by hand, rather than load them electronically onto his palm pilot. The yellow ribbon was nowhere near the correct date, it was set two weeks back to where Kim had written 'Kim flies to San Diego - don't be late!' he moved onwards, trying desperately to recall today's date.  
  
16 weeks. He flicked backwards through his diary, counting the pages, all the way up until number 16; it took him back to the middle of February. He wasn't completely out of the loop on women's cycles. He'd been married for twenty years. They normally ovulated during the last two weeks of it, and that would mean that the baby was probably conceived in the first few days of February or last few days of January. He knew she'd slept with Tony the night they split up, but even so it was too early to have been Tony's. Nina was pregnant with his child.  
  
It took a few seconds for his revelation to set in. The repercussions of loosing Teri had been huge, but he'd never considered never having another child, as one of them until Kim had told him her mother had been pregnant. He had never thought of having another child, but here he was presented with another one.  
  
His cell phone rang in his pocket. He pulled it out and answered it, knowing it would be Tony without checking the display first. "What did you find?" He'd called Tony as soon as he'd spoken to the doctor, although he hadn't divulged Nina's pregnancy to him.  
  
"Not pregnant." Tony told him over the phone, "They checked, blood tests and urine, blacking out is a rare sign of pregnancy...anyway, she wasn't pregnant."  
  
Jack could barely hear Tony's voice over the roar of the fountain behind him, so he rose from the bench and made his way across the plaza, back towards the town centre. The sounds of the children playing in the fountain and cascading water died away, "So the woman the ambulance collected after the car accident wasn't Teri." Jack surmised, "How far from the site of the accident did they find Teri's body?"  
  
"It's less than a mile down the road - I can't believe no body came across it sooner." Tony muttered.  
  
"So after Teri called the ambulance she could have been killed, they could have created the entire story of the amnesia to cover for her not knowing the intricacies of the last few hours." Jack shook his head. Now he was more convinced that ever of Nina's innocence. "She lied to me during the polygraph."  
  
"About which parts?"  
  
"Being guilty, she lied when she said that she killed Teri out of cold blood, and she lied when she said Teri hadn't done anything to threaten the unit."  
  
"She would also volunteer to take a polygraph when someone accused her of lying." Tony reminded him, thinking specifically of the morning of her insurrection, when they'd been hacking into Jack's field assignment files whilst Alberta talked to him. "...Polygraph us if you think we're lying..." he heard Nina say in his head.  
  
"...What, so you can stall some more?" He had thought at the time that Alberta had caught Nina.  
  
"It's different to fool a polygraph to think you're telling the truth than to have it tell you're lying." Jack said to Tony. "How are those decompressed tapes coming along?"  
  
"I sent them this morning, you should get them this afternoon." Jack nodded at the phone and looked around him, he was forming an interrogation profile in his mind. Nina would have been proud.  
  
-24-  
  
"Thought we'd watch a video together." Jack began in a faux-cordial mood as he walked in the interrogation room door. This time the room's sole inhabitants were the two of them a VCR and a television set. He slotted the tape in the VCR and pressed the play button, settling in a chair across the other side of the room. "I hear it's a good one."  
  
"What's it called? And where is the popcorn?" Her words brought back a similar evening, reviewing an interrogation tape at her apartment one night, they'd completed their report quickly and turned in for the night.  
  
"CTU bloopers reel, the Nina Myers tape." He proclaimed proudly, he watched as the camera footage chimed in, time and date, starting from when Nina had gotten back from the safe house. For most of the hours up until then, she'd either been working closely with Jack or Tony or Jamey, and whilst Jamey's loyalties hadn't been true to CTU, they doubted that Jamey knew of Nina, or that Nina knew of Jamey.  
  
He alternated between watching Nina and the footage as they went through Nina's actions for the day. Her actions began to get more and more intriguing as they made it through the later hours Teri had spent at CTU, until he paused at her phone call.  
  
"You called yourself Yelena on the phone." Jack told her, as the camera image froze over her head, looking down on her. When she didn't respond he prodded on. "Do you know who Yelena is?"  
  
"Me." She whispered.  
  
He stood up and tapped the corner of the screen Teri was visible in the distance, talking to Tony. "It's her." He tapped the screen again to exaggerate his point. "That's Yelena Drazen."  
  
"That's your wife."  
  
"That's Yelena Drazen. Why are you covering for her?" He queried. Nina was silent, unwilling to give up the pretense that she was lying. She had always refused to do so, spinning her web further and further, the difference between Nina and any other liar was she could keep hold of the initial thread.  
  
Tony's work had been invaluable, he'd traced Nina's movements for the entire day, and she hadn't done anything questionable up until that point. He took a pile of photo quality screen captures he'd made from the play back. "This is you, sneaking around after her." He had pictures of Nina tailing Teri, being as sneaky as possible, but Tony had still caught it on the video footage.  
  
Nina examined each picture as Jack threw them at her, one by one, increasing the pace with which he threw them at her, until they were just assaulting her, and she sat back in her chair. "I am the guy you tell, Nina." He said gently, sitting on the chair that he'd positioned as close to her as possible before the interview began.  
  
"Jack..." She pleaded, avoiding his eyes.  
  
"I am the guy that you have to tell." He told her again, forcing her to listen to his words.  
  
"You are the guy who's wife I shot." She exclaimed. Standing up and pushing the photographs across the table, the Marshall looked through the glass window to the interview room and Jack shook his head, waving the guy off. "What should I tell you, Jack?" She pressed her back against the plate glass false mirror, and shut her eyes.  
  
"Everything, absolutely everything, if you want to raise your child yourself." He couldn't believe that Nina knew that she was pregnant and was still acting this way.  
  
Her eyes flew open, he was right, she had no idea. "What?"  
  
"If you want to raise your child, to see it grow up, to have it know who its mother is - you have to tell me everything, Nina, or there's nothing I can do to protect you." He spoke from his seat, but immediately got up and walked over to her, keeping a good distance as she began to shake.  
  
"Don't do this, Jack." She whispered, as a few tears escaped her eyes.  
  
"Nina, if you..."  
  
"Don't lie to me..."  
  
"What? Like you've done to me?" He was yelling at her now. She was drug free, in a delicate state, but she'd been removed from the majority of the anti-psychotics she was on previously. The nurse may have asked him not to, but as far as he was concerned, she was fair game. He grabbed the polygraph results from the top of his case, and threw the papers at her, unrolling in her arms. She'd sunken to the floor, and the papers formed a Teepee over her knees, she looked disdainfully at them whilst Jack found the areas where the lines were erratic.  
  
"Look at this...Did you kill my wife in cold blood?...Did she do anything to jeopardise CTU?" He held the two erratic areas in front of her face, gesturing wildly with the papers. "What did Teri do to make you question her? Why were you following her?"  
  
He watched as his second in command battled with the decision in her mind, she'd wrapped her arms around herself and was hugging her stomach, sobbing quietly trying to bury her head on her knees, but he wouldn't let her. "You have to tell me, Nina. This child depends on it."  
  
Still indecisive, Jack stood from the table, he collected his last resort from the case and tossed the last photo at her, it was an ultrasound picture, taken yesterday, whilst she was unconscious. The peanut shape that indicated her child was circled with a red line. "This child."  
  
She looked at the paper, and began to wipe off her tears. "If that's Yelena," she sobbed, "What happened to Teri?" She asked.  
  
"She was murdered earlier in the evening, replaced by a terrorist agent who'd undergone plastic surgery to look exactly like Teri." Jack told her, reasonably confident in the truth of his statement. "Nina, you have to tell me..."  
  
Nina sobbed and looked up at him. She was terrified, and sitting on the floor in the corner of the room, he knees huddled up under her chin, her tiny arms wrapped around her legs. His concern for her was more paternal than anything else. She seemed so tiny, so feeble, he couldn't help but compare her mentally to a child herself. Something in her eyes told him she was about to break.  
  
"She was different, after the accident, I know she had amnesia, but it went beyond that..." He'd so rarely heard Nina sound unsure, it scared him too. "She had a phone, I think....I don't know - Jack, I just..."  
  
"Try harder, Nina, you're doing fine." He whispered, "I need you."  
  
"She called someone, she called herself Yelena, she said things...I know she wasn't sure who she was but...Teri was giving them information."  
  
-24-  
  
"You still haven't told me why you lied." Jack pointed out to Nina as she left the ladies restrooms at the courthouse. She hadn't realised he'd followed her to the door, and was now nervous she'd taken so long.  
  
Nina avoided the question, still reveling in being a free woman. CTU had presented a case for her, and she'd been exonerated, whilst the blame was still on 'Yelena Drazen' she'd been cleared as an alias. Jack had gotten a trial date for a week after he'd petitioned for it, so early that his daughter wasn't returning from her month long holiday for another few days. He'd cited Nina as an important member of his team, and the judge had been asked to move the trial as close as possible by a US senator and presidential candidate. "I'm starving, can we go eat?" She asked him, they made their way through the double doors towards the courtroom she'd emerged from ten minutes earlier.  
  
Nina glanced over at Tony uneasily, stood in the doorway to the courtroom, fidgeting in his suit he looked dejected. They'd spoken briefly and decided that anything they'd had before had to be discarded, and despite the fact it was at Tony's urging, she doubted he truly wanted her to agree with him.  
  
Jack didn't notice him, he led her past him along the corridor, to the security guards at the end. "I should get back to CTU." He told her, officially she had been reinstated at CTU, but she and Jack had agreed that she would return to work in a few days, start a fresh week so he had time to start the ball rolling to get rid of Alberta.  
  
Jack pulled his sunglasses out of his shirt pocket, putting them on just as they stepped out into the sunlight. He paused in the middle of the sidewalk outside, and watched Nina squint at him. She was wearing a suit, black skirt and jacket, which she was rapidly undoing to avoid overheating. The breeze that tousled her hair was nowhere enough to cool her, and she shrugged off the woolen jacket. "You want to put that in my car, and we can find somewhere to grab something quickly?"  
  
"Sounds like a good idea." She shut her eyes and turned her head up to the sun. The people flooding out of the courthouse were bowing around them, like waves around a pebble. A few hit, but the majority walked straight past.  
  
Jack placed a hand at the small of her back and led her down the road, stopping at the front of his car and accepting her jacket. There were a few cafes around the courthouse, and they could easily walk from there, so he opened his car door and put her coat, and then his on the passenger seat. Nina was still smiling up at the sun, presumably having been shielded from it at prison. Whilst looking in the opposite direction, he was able to study her for a second.  
  
The white blouse she wore only served to illuminate how pale and thin she was now. Her colouring had always been light, and she'd always been thin, but this worried him now. He could only make up the slight hump of her stomach because he knew it was there, but the loose blouse and the black skirt made it less noticeable. He hadn't told the court, and he doubted she'd told Tony, but despite her objections, he'd brought the information with him necessary to plead with it.  
  
He rolled up his shirtsleeves and patted his wallet in his back pocket, and then joined Nina on the sidewalk, leading her, once again by the small of her back, down the road. They stopped outside a small street cafe, and he approached the hostess, asking her for a table for two outside. He had intended to stop further down the road, but having seen how Nina was enjoying the sunlight, he thought this place would be more appropriate.  
  
"I have an apology to make to you." He confessed, taking off his sunglasses as he moved his head into the shade of the table umbrella. Nina didn't say anything, folding her arms on the table. "If we'd done this three months ago, if I'd paid attention to what you were saying back at CTU..."  
  
"I was unconscious, Jack."  
  
Jack shook his head. "We managed to get you prosecuted and sentenced whilst you were in a coma, because I thought you'd shot Teri, because I believed you could be a traitor."  
  
"I could have been." She pointed out, raising a hand to rub her temples for a minute. The truth was that Jack was right, that he should have formed his case more clearly months ago, and he should have listened to her. If she wanted to blame him for a gunshot wound and coma, three months of prison, and possible deformities to her child, it would have been easy to do so, but she couldn't do that. "She was your _wife_ how could you expect her?"  
  
It was the first time that she had ever spoken of Teri without a hint of disdain in her voice. Since their affair, there had always been a certain pitch in her voice that he hadn't noticed, and now she seemed to speak about her kindly. "Why did you lie to me?" he asked her. Nina stalled, collecting her glass of water and taking a long sip. "Why did you tell me that you were the traitor?"  
  
Nina watched him as she took her sip, gauging whether he truly wanted to know. "She was dead, I was in jail. What did it matter if your daughter spent her life believing her mother was true? What did it matter if you thought that your wife loved you and wouldn't hurt you?"  
  
"My wife did, she wasn't my wife." Jack pointed out to her, and then distracted himself from the painful memories with his napkin, folding it and then spreading it across the flat surface of the table.  
  
Teri had died in a car accident, probably forced off the road, and then Yelena Drazen had taken her place. The keycard he'd been presented with early that morning had contained records of plastic surgery done on a male and female, and Yelena Drazen was the female, once the doctors had checked her out, she'd been taken to CTU, where she'd gathered information to help her father try and kill Jack. Nina had become suspicious, and tailed her, eventually finding out about the regular check in times and calling the Drazens with slightly false information. Just before midnight, she'd taken Yelena out to the parking garage to talk to her, believing her to be Teri, and shot her when she'd tried to escape.  
  
Nina allowed him sufficient time to recover, amiably changing the subject, neither of them wanted to dig deeper into their recent past. "I have no idea what I'm going to do for the next few hours." She admitted. "Haven't been in the sun for a while, don't suppose that my swimsuit survived the auctions?"  
  
Jack let out a short laugh. "Apartment searching, we can get you several papers, and see what we can find." Jack glanced down at his watch, taking note of the time. "You need to go to the bank." He told her eventually.  
  
"What?" she asked.  
  
"The Citibank across the road." He pointed it out to her, and she turned in his seat to follow his finger. "You've got an appointment with the manager, it shouldn't take long." Nina raised her eyebrows at him and slowly rose from her seat, after a few moments of cautious study, she walked out of the fenced area, and headed over to the bank.  
  
Jack had made arrangements for the money removed from her bank accounts to be returned to her, deposited in an account managed at the branch across the road. The money had been transferred to a custodial account controlled by CTU, and he'd transferred as much as he could locate back across. 


	6. Domestic disturbances

Jack slammed the door with much more force than necessary when he walked in the door to his house. The door lock engaged on its own, and he tore off his sunglasses and slouched down on the sofa, running his fingers through his hair and gripping a handful at the top of his scalp.  
  
He didn't know what to do. Nina had only been working back at CTU for three weeks and she'd put in for a transfer request, the piece of paper he'd held in his hands at the office until it had come close to tearing. Nina had conveniently left for the evening when he'd returned to his office, and now he couldn't get a hold of her. She wasn't answering her cell or home phone, and when he'd driven past two hours ago, and then twenty minutes ago, she hadn't been in. As a last resort he'd driven past Tony's apartment, not really sure what to do if he discovered her there, and found his driveway empty only to discover him at CTU, busy working.  
  
It was nearly two am, and if he was going to take Kim out before her driving test the next morning, he was going to need to turn in soon. He stood in the corridor for a moment, watching his keys on the table by the door as though they were about to move, to run and hide for him, much as he presumed Nina had done.  
  
There was a knock at the door, whoever it was avoiding the doorbell, and he gripped the handle and pulled the door open with so much force it created a bit of a vacuum in its wake. Nina was standing on his doorstep, clutching a small bag he rarely saw her with over his shoulder. "I need a favour." She asked, walking past him and into his living room, ignoring his mood, which he projected with every subtle alteration in his body language.  
  
"You need a favour? Isn't approving a transfer favour enough?" He asked her, keeping his voice low to avoid waking Kim.  
  
"That's what I wanted to talk to you about." She told him, she watched him for a second, and then deciding, having judged his mood, and she spoke quickly. "Tear it up."  
  
Having spent the last six or seven hours chasing her, trying desperately to find her and talk to her about her transfer request, he couldn't believe what she said. He'd spent the last few hours fretting about loosing Nina, his child. Having them gone from his life, much as Teri and the child she carried. "What?"  
  
"Tear it up, destroy it, I don't care, burn it..." And he kissed her, holding her jaw like delicate china in his hands as he pressed his lips to hers, pulling away as fast as he'd kissed her, leaving her stunned.  
  
It was her turn. "What?"  
  
She seemed disorientated, but she wasn't confused, or pushing him away. Jack wanted her to know he needed her in his life; it may have been only possible since Teri was gone, but he had to hold her. He kissed her again, more intentionally, this time wrapping his arm around her waist, lifting her to a height closer to his own spurring her back against the kitchen wall. Nina used the wall as leverage to fix herself to him, and she started with the buttons on his shirt, removing the brown material from his skin.  
  
Jack let her slip his shirt from his shoulders, and used his elbows to brace himself against the wall. The bulge of their child, whilst nearly noticeable under her clothing, was always present in his mind and he was afraid to hurt her. He continued kissing her, her mouth, her neck, her collarbone, and as the shirt began to interfere with his progress, he gripped the lapels of her blouse and tore the shirt, letting the buttons pop and scatter, leaving him free to devour the revealed skin.  
  
-24-  
  
"What time do you start tomorrow?" Nina asked in the darkness, softly rubbing Jack's arm, the little blonde hairs there had provided her with fascination for the last two or so minutes, and coupled with tracing the cracks on the ceiling, she was content to lie here for eternity. She wondered for her sanity.  
  
"Kim's driving test is nine - something, I posted out until ten thirty." He told her, not looking up from the pillow, his head was buried in the soft material, and it muffled his words.  
  
Nina wondered if she was keeping him up, if he was desperate to get to sleep, but she continued anyway. "I've got an appointment with my ob-gyn tomorrow."  
  
Jack rolled onto his side and slid closer to her, he left his arm across her chest because he enjoyed Nina rubbing it, as much as she seemed soothed by the action, and it was just above the bump of his child. "A check-up? You want me to come?" he asked, settling his sleepy head into the space where the pillow bowed above her shoulder.  
  
"It's an amniocentesis." Nina told him, "They're going to take some of the fluid around the baby and test it for drug levels." The truth was she was terrified about this, if the results came back high, that her body hadn't been shielding the baby from the effects of the drugs, then it was quite likely that she would need someone there, but tomorrow was the procedure, not the test results, and the procedure didn't really scare her.  
  
Jack awoke a little, and using his second hand, which had been dangling idol above his head, he brushed away a few stray hairs. "What time is it?" He asked her, having decided to attend.  
  
"Ten." She told him, watching as his fingers moved and brushed at the hair on either of her forehead. Her words were stifled by a yawn. Having yawned and replenished her body's supply of oxygen, she reopened her eyes, just as Jack's finger swooped in and scratched the tip of her nose.  
  
"Are you driving there?" He asked, "Because if Kim passes, and I doubt there's a chance she'll fail, then I can have her drop me off, and she can go see her friends."  
  
Nina stretched out the kinks in her neck, tilting it first towards Jack, and then towards the edge of the bed. Some how, she was unsure whether he led her, or she moved of her own accord, but she ended up on her side, resting her head comfortably on his arm. "You need some sleep." He whispered to her as she buried herself against his chest.  
  
His arm slipped happily around her waist, and he placed a kiss in the nest of hair at the nape of her neck. "Goodnight." He whispered contentedly. "I'll be up at half-six, seven? Do you want me to wake you?"  
  
Nina considered it for so long, he wondered if she'd fallen asleep. "Yeah, wake me before you go, but it's probably not a good idea to let Kim know I'm here." She proposed, stretching her legs out under the covers like a cat.  
  
Jack and Kim had reburied Teri only a week or so ago, any healing that his daughter had done up to that point had been completely undone. She had been told that Nina hadn't killed her mother, but it would probably be a while before it was advisable to re-introduce them. Nina hoped she'd be ready by the time she gave birth, because it was looking like she would need Jack to help if anything was wrong with the baby. "I guess I'd better collect your clothes from the corridor." He suggested, pulling the covers back and leaving the room before she could protest at the cold.  
  
He returned quickly, presenting her with her shirt. She sat up a little to look at it. "It has no buttons." Jack laughed as he slid, once again, under the covers and pressed himself against the warm body there.  
  
She glanced over at him and laughed. "You tore all the buttons off?" She queried, incredulous.  
  
Jack examined the material more carefully, looking for his saving grace. "No, see he's still hanging on." He contradicted, referring to a tiny black button towards the bottom of the blouse, as he touched a finger to it, it fell off, rolling into the folds of the bed covers, never to be seen again.  
  
Nina laughed at this, leaning into Jack as her body shook with the laughter. Jack held her vibrating form, smiling into her hair, as the laughter subsided. "I guess I'll have to wear one of yours tomorrow. Maybe they'll fit better this time."  
  
Jack smiled into her hair, Nina was still laughing at her shirt. "Take your pick." He offered, gesturing to the wardrobe with his free hand. His smile broadened as her laughter died to no more than a few quiet, fit like movements, and he leant backwards, pulling her down with him, until they were resting quietly on the bed, ready to sleep.  
  
-24-  
  
"I'm going to drop it!" called Kim, attempting to hurry Nina as she jogged towards Kim in the corridor. The box was full of research notes for the paper Nina was currently working on, and, as Kim had yelled to her earlier, was 'heavy as hell'.  
  
Nina finally reached Kim in time to slow the box's descent the floor, allowing Kim a few moments to recuperate before they picked it up again and found it a more permanent resting place. "What do you say we just make this room the study?" Nina asked, waiting whilst Kim sucked in huge gulps of air.  
  
Kim smiled at her. They were sitting on the floor of the largest room in the house, predestined to be the sitting area, kitchen, and dining area. It was absolutely massive, twenty-five, thirty feet in each direction, with two corridors and rooms leading off to one side of it. The corridors actually looped round and joined one another, but Kim still wasn't sure she wouldn't get lost in the house. The one room she was certain she knew was this one, as the front door opened into it, and she wasn't about to give it up. She continued the joke anyway, having promised her father to try and get along with Nina, who would soon be her evil step-mother, or at the very least, the mother of her step-sibling. "I think you'd need all of this space for your books!"  
  
In Nina's previous apartments had been lined with bookcases, but that was nothing compared to her walls during her post-graduate years, when she had forfeited a living room for a study, living without a television but with several thousand books. "You're probably right." She joked back, gauging Kim's breathing pace. "Let's give this another shot."  
  
Both of them gripped the underside of the container and lifted it, trying to put as much of the weight over their knees, but finding it just as hard as any alternative route. "Oh god!" Nina exclaimed, realising how heavy the box truly was, and trying to keep it away from both her stomach and feet, afraid of the very real possibility of dropping it.  
  
"I _know_!" Kim pointed out, as they made it around the corner and headed to the study door, which they'd had the presence of mind to prop open earlier.  
  
"Well, I should stop writing these things." Nina commented, praying that this was the last time she moved, and would never, ever be stupid enough to tell the delivery men to just 'leave it all in here' Kim repeated her earlier comment, which provided them with a little amusement, until they'd made it far enough into the room so that they wouldn't trip over it. The descent the box had to the floor was startlingly similar to a fall, but they were both too exhausted to care. Kim began to massage her arm.  
  
Nina rounded the box and took Kim's sore arm from her, checking for any scrapes or potential bruises. "It'll be fine," she told Jack's daughter, once she was satisfied that the skin wasn't broken.  
  
"Can't it be broken?" She whined. Nina shook her head and pushed her towards the door so they could get back to work. "Can't it just be split in half and all bloody so I can stop?" Nina laughed at her, and they made their way down the corridor, Nina having to guide Kim with a hand on her back lest she collapse on the sofa.  
  
Jack was stood in the sunlight streaming from the door, looking around at his grand room, boxes where stacked higher than him, and his furniture was pushed to one corner of the room, making room for the boxes, the majority of which were labeled 'Kim's clothes' and 'Nina's books' Nina and Kim rounded the corner, laughing, as Kim made jokes and Nina forced her to work.  
  
"Hey." He greeted them, taking a step down from the stairs and taking off his sunglasses. He placed them on the counter as he opened and arm to each of them, placing a kiss on their heads in turn, starting with Nina. "What happened the staircase?" He joked. At some point, the movers had started walking up the stairs to deposit their boxes, making a pile nearly the height of the room.  
  
"It's in here somewhere." Kim grumbled. Exhaustively resting her head against her father's shoulder. He watched her forehead and nose for a minute, she let out a huge sigh, and then muttered, almost inaudibly. "I think I'm going to die in here, get found by search dogs."  
  
Jack and Nina shared a smile, and he let Nina go to hug his daughter, rubbing her aching limbs. "Well, I'm back now, so maybe you can carry a few of the medium weight boxes." He let her go and tossed his car keys down with his shades, pushing his shirt sleeves up the extra inch and moving to a particularly offensive pile of boxes.  
  
"What did Tony want?" Nina tried to ask as casually as possible; Jack had received a call a few hours ago, from Tony, asking him to come into CTU for a little while. Jack had been nearly an hour, and, ever the workaholic, Nina was intensely curious.  
  
Jack was going to have fun not telling her, he didn't doubt she'd be valuable helping him, but he knew it wasn't on her exact case load, and wanted her to have as little to think about as possible. "It was about the PFT's tax returns." Jack supplied.  
  
"You still haven't briefed me on that." Nina pointed out, following him back to their study.  
  
Jack smiled as he set the box down on the table. "That's because you're not going to work on it." He opened the lid of the box and glanced at it's contents, books, huge thick volumes of psychology text, classical novels, a few political manifestos and published papers of Nina's and her colleagues', professors' and friends', he glanced up at the bookcases that the movers had thankfully put in the right place. He doubted there was enough room.  
  
Nina made her way over, "Jack," she began.  
  
"You know, Nina," he began, as he fished out a handful of books. "You've really got this whole sleeping with the boss thing wrong, you're supposed to get out of work." He stressed the 'out' and placed three books in her left hand. She smiled at him, and shook her head, and he reached his arms around her waist to pull her in for a kiss. "Try and empty that box." He suggested and made his way out of the room.  
  
-24-  
  
Kim looked up from her move to glance at her father; his eyes didn't shift from the board, as he considered his next move, which gave her a rare opportunity to glance over at Nina. She was seated on the floor in front of the coffee table, her laptop placed on its low surface, she was reading through an earlier draft of the paper she was writing, rewriting it with the edifications she'd added a few days ago, and had been terrified she'd lost in the move. After a few seconds she took the biro out of her mouth, and began typing once again on the keyboard. "She's really playing solitaire." Kim whispered across the table.  
  
"I'm sorry, what?" Her dad hadn't been paying attention, and asked her to repeat her statement. She used the same hushed tone, although she was sure that this time, Nina was more aware of her voice. Jack joined in with her line of thought, smiling. "The books are just for show. She's just about to beat the computer."  
  
Nina looked up when she realised she was the topic of conversation. "Huh?" She glanced over at them, squinting, unsure of the nature of their perusal, until she eventually dissolved into a smile, realising they were in good moods. Jack turned quickly back to the chessboard, making his move before he stood and walked to the couch.  
  
Nina shut down her files on approach, and was telling the computer to turn off when he settled down onto the couch. "Definitely, she even shut down the computer when I got somewhere I could see." Kim leant her arms around the back of the chair and turned to laugh with her dad. She paused an extra second to fill the bewildered Nina in on their conversation.  
  
"We theorised you were playing solitaire."  
  
Jack leaned down and wrapped his arms around her shoulders as she realised the joke, arriving just in time to receive both a kiss and a light swat on the arm. They enjoyed the easy camaraderie for a moment before Nina glanced down at her wristwatch, which rested beside her computer on the table. It was very late, and they were all exhausted, but the opportunity to do some living in their house had been too much to pass up. "I'm heading off to bed. You should come up too, if you're going into CTU tomorrow." She suggested to Jack, bending her knees under the table and giving him time to move before she stood up in his face.  
  
He moved back and took her offered hand when she stood, easily, despite the late stage of pregnancy. They made their way to the base of the staircase ready to make their way to bed. "Don't stay up too late, sweetheart." Jack warned his daughter. She nodded from her seat, and then glanced over at them as they took a step up the stairs.  
  
She hated to think of her dad having sex, but, as Nina had made every effort to be a friend rather than any form of authority figure, she couldn't resist making a joke. "You going to break in the new bed then?"  
  
Nina laughed a short burst with her, and then refuted her suggestion. "I'm too exhausted, we've done too much physical exercise for today." She referred to the lot of them, and suddenly Kim began to feel terribly exhausted, yawning as she noticed a coffee cup on the table.  
  
"I'll wash your mug up." She offered, and rose from her chair to collect the cup. Nina thanked her, and they continued up the stairs. Teri took the mug to the sink and poured in some washing up liquid, giving the cup a quick swill, Nina had already drained any drops of liquid, and placed it, clean, upturned on the dryer.  
  
The last week had seemed terribly domestic, hugely in contrast with the months before. She desperately missed her mother, but after a few months, seeing the decline in her father's concentration, her sense of loss had faded into a need to make him better. Whilst she would always remember similar moments with her mother, she had to admit how relieved she was he had Nina, and didn't have to worry about him any more.  
  
At least with Nina, she could be sure that in fifteen years, her stepsibling's parents wouldn't split because they couldn't talk about her father's work. She turned off the light in the kitchen and made her way over to the staircase herself. She buried her mother twice now, and she was sure that missing her profusely wasn't going to bring her back. She also knew that Nina hadn't fired the bullet that killed her, rather, shot the bullet that had eventually enabled them to find her mother's real body, so instead of allowing her to mourn over the grave of a complete stranger, she now had a grave that held something important. The excitement of having a new baby brother or sister also helped allay any qualms she had about her father's relationship to Nina as well.  
  
"So are we really not going to break in the new bed?" Her fathers voice resounded down the corridor as she searched for the light switch. The corridor at the top of the stairs seemed to be amplifying the sound.  
  
"I'm not that tired, Jack, I am eating for two, and one of us is very small." Nina answered him, as Kim found the switch and turned it off, leaving her in the light from the floor above. Kim paused on the stairs a minute, waiting for them to enter their bedroom. She heard a door slam and sprinted up the steps to her lovely new room. She hoped the walls muffled the sound, at least as much as the corridor amplified it.  
  
-24-  
  
Je suis fini! Sorry, guys I know it's all cutsie at the end (what is it with me and long fics!) but after I got the ending spoilt, I had to write an ending that would allow her to be good, that way, I could watch Nina's scenes without wanting to throw cushions at the TV.  
  
On to my Jack-whumping fic, which will, with any luck, not be as long as 'Nobel Business'!! And maybe will have a less domestic ending.  
  
-Aria 


End file.
